Twilight's End
by Hahukum Konn
Summary: One of the old greasers looks back on his life and wonders who will keep alive the days gone by. Rated for mild language.
1. The Last Breath of Memory

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters used herein which come from S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders.

* * *

The man, tall and silver-haired, stood in the old house watching the driving rain through the front window. He didn't know how long it was that he'd been standing there, but the ache in his back that never entirely went away these days was telling him he'd been standing too long. 

He sat down, carefully easing himself onto the couch. All he had was memories. Memories of days gone by so long ago he couldn't be sure they still existed. He closed his eyes and remembered fondly the black-haired boy who'd rarely said more than a few words at a time, but who could be counted on to pitch in whenever help was needed. He remembered the almost white-blond youth whose expression rarely let anything through, a mask that hid his affection for the black-haired youth.

He remembered a boy who loved to read and write, who would see the beauty in the world around him in a way he never could. He remembered a dashing young man, always ready with a kind word, and who never failed to be seen near a gaggle of girls.

He remembered another young man, angry at his father and turning to the pale substitute of the unconditional support his closest friends all offered him. And finally, he remembered a laughing joker, a man who couldn't resist getting a word in no matter how exasperating it might be.

_Those were the days, weren't they? We thought we'd be indestructible. I should have realized we'd drift apart. Dally and Johnny were just the first to break away. And Dally had the chance to choose to die._

The Vietnam War had taken the dashing Sodapop and cast him back in a closed casket. They had been warned that it would not be a good idea to open it.

Steve had fallen by the way in one of the last dying gasps of the great rumbles, when he'd taken a knife meant for someone else. Just plain bad luck, everybody always said, but the rumble had been after Sodapop had come back horizontally.

Two-Bit had hit the bottle hard, especially after Sodapop had been drafted. He had expired of cirrhosis of the liver in the late 1970s.

And Ponyboy. He had somehow failed to outlive his older brother, Darrel Curtis. He had died five years ago, the victim of an unusually nasty flu that had gotten around one winter. On his deathbed, he had grinned, that smile a brief gust of wind from the great days gone by, and whispered, "Stayin' gold. That's the best thing I ever did."

Darry sat alone, the ache in his back a reminder of the years of hard work he'd put in trying to make ends meet doing construction and roofing. When his back had almost quit on him around the time Two-Bit died, he'd taken his workers' comp and decided to finally get that college education he'd always wanted. The four years of scrimping and saving and sweating and studying finally paid off when the owner of the construction company he'd once worked for agreed to sell to him.

_Goddamnit, it's not **fair!** _raged Darry as he smacked his fist helplessly on the arm of the couch. Why did he have to be the last to go, to expire of simple old age, the wearing out of the body and the exhaustion of the mind? Why did he have to live on in the twilight of his life, existing just for the sake of it?

Darry had been able to hang onto the house through all the upheavals and swirling of world events. The irony was, there was nobody left to appreciate the house. Ponyboy's children were off, leading their own lives. Old Uncle Darry wasn't exactly going to be their supreme concern.

Oh, they'd go through the knickknacks and _ooh_ and _aah_ over some of the vintage furniture and so on, but they'd just sell what they didn't want and put the house up for sale. And with that would go _puff_ the last breath of the great days, those turbulent, trying, happy, rich, colorful times when they were all together, and nobody would ever tear them apart because they were just too strong and too closely knit for that to happen. But nobody would appreciate the significance of those long-ago days. Or would someone? Anyone?

Darry stood up, wishing the melancholy would go away, and carefully eased himself down the hall to what had once been Ponyboy's room. Even though he couldn't really afford it, he paid someone to come in once every month and dust, clean and generally keep the house in livable condition, even though no-one had been in two of the bedrooms for over twenty years.

Ponyboy's room had been Sodapop's as well, but after Sodapop had died, Darry had slowly stopped thinking of it as having belonged to both, and he suddenly felt guilty that he'd mentally abandoned Sodapop. The room stood as a preserve of the past, and in particular, Darry knew exactly where to look for the one thing he wanted to get.

From the topmost drawer of the desk, he withdrew faded, yellowing sheets of paper, with the scrawl of handwriting over fifty years old. He went outside onto the porch, and noticed the rain had stopped. The sun was shining, and the air felt crisp and cool. Just for a few moments, Darry's back quit aching, and he drew a sharp breath, taking in the deep liquid essence of the spring air. Not yet heavily-laden with the plant smells of summer, but with just a hint of pine.

He sat on the chair and let the sunlight fall onto the paper. His rheumy eyes had trouble focussing, and he fumbled in his pocket for the reading glasses.

"When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman…"

**- - -**

Darry's eyes opened. He'd fallen asleep, clutching the sheets in his hand. He panicked as he realized he could have ruined the papers forever, but the paper was still resilient enough to withstand some wear and tear. He went back into the house, and as he did so, he remembered he'd fallen asleep just after finishing the manuscript. He hadn't been conscious of time passing, absorbed as he'd been once again in the glory days of the past. But he had a mission. He took a large envelope off the desk he kept near the kitchen, and carefully, reverently, slipped the papers inside, sealing the envelope. Equally carefully, he wrote out a note, in neat lettering.

Darrel Curtis placed the envelope and paper on his desk, then put on a coat and went back outside. The twilight was just beginning to come on, and he felt a sense of accomplishment, one he had not really felt for some years. He sat in the same chair, and wrapped the coat about himself, and closed his eyes, promising himself he'd wake up shortly.

Once again, Darry's eyes snapped open, frantic at the thought that he'd missed something. Swiftly, an unusual sense of peace began to envelop him. As he relaxed back in his chair, the face of his brother, Ponyboy, swam before him. It wasn't the aged face he had been used to, but the youthful face he'd had once upon a time. Then Sodapop, carefree and laughing, swelled before his face and vanished.

Steve Randle, his face peaceful for once, grinning as he fished a cigarette from behind his ear. Two-Bit, holding a beer in his hand, cracking a joke, laughing his head off. Johnny Cade, cracking a rare smile as he shyly looked at the sunset. Dallas Winston, cigarette in his mouth, squinting at something, getting ready to fight just before he vanished.

And then he heard the last thing he would ever hear – a voice that wasn't a voice, but a combination of several speaking in unison: "Welcome home, Darrel Curtis."

**- - -**

The next day, a relatively young woman, who had cleaned the house for some years, drove over to Darry's house. She noticed that Darry was sitting outside on the porch, apparently resting. She left him alone, and went inside the house. Although she knew she had no business doing so, her eyes were drawn to the envelope and the folded paper next to it. The envelope read, "To Gina."

She took them and a sense of foreboding went through her. She walked back out onto the porch, and looked at Darry again. She noticed that his face, for the first time that she could remember, wasn't pinched from the pain she knew he had from his bad back.

She said, "Hi, Darry."

No answer. A gnawing sense of unease hit her stomach as she gently touched Darry's shoulder. "Wake up, Darry!"

She shook his shoulder, and nothing happened. Crashing realization hit, and she silently held back a sob as a tear escaped her eye, for Darrel Shaynne Curtis was dead.

As she waited for the police and ambulance to come, she opened the envelope. There were many sheets of yellowing paper inside. She then unfolded the folded white sheet, which read:

_"The papers in this envelope are the most valuable property of the Curtis family. Please treat them with the care and respect you would give to the most valuable family heirloom. For heirlooms can't do for you what this story will – teach the value of caring, friendship and family."_

Gina sat on the porch steps, staring into the sky.


	2. New Understanding

Disclaimer: The characters from the book The Outsiders are not mine; they belong to S. E. Hinton.

I had intended it to be a one-shot, but the story does seem to want to keep going. I may actually end up multichaptering, but the plot bunnies need to be nice to me. So thanks go to all reviewers, and on with the story...

* * *

Gina Kavanagh had made her report to the police, and the medical technicians from the ambulance had carefully taken Darry's body away for the _pro forma_ autopsy, although everybody agreed that simple old age had finally overtaken the man. 

She had first met the man when he had been placing advertisements asking for a once-a-month cleaner, and she'd answered the ad, as she'd done housecleaning before for people, and her neat-freak nature made her work stand out. She cleaned part-time while she worked to put herself through school, and at the age of 25, was close to graduating.

Darrel Curtis had paid reasonably well for her work, and she had made an extra effort to make sure his house was as clean as could be. Because of this, he'd asked her to be the regular cleaner and to consider the once-a-month arrangement to be in place indefinitely until further notice.

So over time, she had gotten to know Darry somewhat, although their conversations were never too long and she never came by socially. She dimly remembered having seen his brother once, the man named Ponyboy. Or Pony, as Darry had called him. But Ponyboy had been dead for five years, and she recalled no firm details.

On impulse, Gina went back into the house, and found a framed photograph of seven young people, all grinning for the camera, surrounded by brown grass. The colors were a bit faded; photographs back then didn't hold their colors well. She didn't want to take it out of the frame lest she expose the picture to further oxidation, but finally she decided she needed to see what was written on the back of the picture; people often did that in the old days to remind themselves of where and when the picture had been taken.

The writing on the back read, simply, "The Lot, July 1966." _Holy smokes, that picture's over fifty years old!_

Gina quickly replaced the picture in the frame, and decided to take it with her, along with the envelope and paper. The fact that Darry had left her a rather thick stack of papers, and stressed its importance in his written note, suggested that what remained of his extended family would not appreciate the picture or the papers as he felt she would.

Darry had once mentioned that there had been a grassy, abandoned lot a block away from the house, which had been kept the same way, in the same condition, for many years. But the lot itself had long since been replaced by a mini-mall of stores for the people who lived in the surrounding area. Even many of the houses had been torn down and replaced, so that Darry's house looked very old-fashioned. The now-gone lot must have been the lot mentioned on the back of the picture.

Gina wondered why those seven people, one of who seemed to resemble Darry, although it was hard to tell, were important enough to merit keeping a picture on a desk for so many years.

**- - -**

Gina had gone home, fixed herself a coffee, and slumped heavily on her couch. She lived in the basement of her parents' place while she finished school, and although she had a lot of privacy, it would still be a relief when she got her own place sooner or later.

She'd started reading the yellowed pages, and got so absorbed that the passage of time, as it had for Darry, became meaningless. She became lost in a misty past suddenly made so clear. She felt the highs and lows as the first of many turbulent times assaulted the gang of seven, and felt a keen sense of loss as Dallas and Johnny died futilely, paying far too early for whatever sins they'd committed.

Afterwards, wiping her eyes and returning to the present, from Ponyboy's descriptions, she was able to start matching names to faces in the picture. She then realized why it had been so important; it was one of the only links Darry had to people he'd been so close to, so long ago.

The dangerous white-blond Dallas stared defiantly into the camera, while Johnny, telltale scar present on his face, stood somewhat in front of him, almost as a child bird stays under the wing of the mother. He stared pensively, as though he were nervous about something. Darry, the tallest one, so impossibly _young_, stood to Dally's right (the left in the picture), arms crossed, grinning slightly. Sodapop stood to Darry's right, and Ponyboy to Sodapop's right. Both wore broad grins, and Sodapop was waving goofily. Steve, swirled greased hair and all, was crouched in front of Sodapop, smiling slightly, and Two-Bit was sprawled at the feet of the Curtises, leaning on one elbow almost negligently, grinning and waving.

It was irritating and also saddening to realize she'd never know who had taken the picture. If she'd had to guess, her best bet would have been Sandy, Sodapop's then-girlfriend.

She knew right then and there she was going to Darry's funeral, appropriate or not. She'd gotten an insight into the man that few others had, and all of them had been gone for years. At first, she remembered, she'd called him "Mister Curtis".

_After about a year of this, he had said, "Gina?"_

"_Yes?"_

"_Call me Darry, please."_

"_But…that wouldn't be proper, Mr. Curt—"_

"_I'm pulling rank on you; I'm older, wiser, and therefore I insist. Call me Darry."_

"_Okay… Darry."_

_He'd worn a rare smile, as though something had finally amused him._

At the time, she'd simply wanted to humor him. Now, Gina realized that the old man had few personal connections with the world around him, and it had been a wish for one last individual in the world to address him, not as an elder or superior, but as an equal, someone who had entered the inner greaser domain.

The world had changed so much since the 1960s, but the one thing Gina knew was still a constant was that teenagers still had a hard time figuring out where they stood in the world. Adults had found their place, for better or worse, and it was that anchor that let them weather the storms of life even as they grew more personally conservative in their outlook, more resistant to change and new things.

And teenagers still fought in schools and outside of them over things only dimly understood by adults who'd lost _their_ connection with their own youth. Maybe the story Ponyboy wrote still held relevance (she could still see the "A" grade scrawled on the front, and a "Congratulations, Ponyboy!" next to it. She wondered if the "Mr. Syme" mentioned in the story had relented and given Ponyboy a better grade than the C he said he would give if Ponyboy turned in anything at all. She hoped so, but alas, she'd never know). Maybe it could still help teenagers find their grounding, and see all the different ways people dealt with hardships in their lives.

And how some of them could break and fall by the way, while others, more resilient, or perhaps less fragile, became stronger as the years went by and gained their permanence. Dallas Winston had shattered when the one anchor, such as it was, in _his_ life had gone because of a twist of fate. Ponyboy Curtis had nearly fallen into the same trap of hardening so much that an impact too swift for him to resist would shatter _him_.

Yet Ponyboy had endured. And clearly, Darry had as well. Maybe the story, if she could get it published anywhere, would save someone's life...


	3. The Funeral

Disclaimer: Any characters from S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders are used here for the purpose of a fanfiction story, and not for any financial gain.

Thanks go to BlackLightningDX for the beta-reading. :-)

* * *

Gina had carefully checked the obituary columns of the newspapers over the next few days, and found out that the funeral would be held on the weekend coming up. 

"DARREL SHAYNNE CURTIS, b. Jan. 5 1946 – d. Mar. 10 2017. Survived by –" and here, Gina skipped ahead. She didn't know any of those people. "–service to be held at Moore Funeral Home, March 18 2017."

It seemed kind of bizarre to realize that Darry was actually seventy-one when he died. _Seventy-one. Geez._ It hammered home just how much time had passed since that story written on the paper. The date on the front had been October 3, 1966.

She made sure she had a tasteful outfit for the funeral, and then with some difficulty put her mind back onto her homework for her university courses.

**- - - - -**

The funeral itself was astonishingly sparse. Exactly three people showed up, if you didn't count the funeral home director and the priest the guy had gotten from the Methodist Church.

And one of those three was Gina. _Do Ponyboy's grandchildren really no longer appreciate their great-uncle at all? Family was the most important damn thing these guys had!_

She stood at some distance behind the two people with grey hair – so at least Ponyboy's children still appreciated Darry – listening to the priest intone the words, words that seemed futile and empty when you realized that death was one of the biggest transitions that ever happened to someone.

As the two people stepped forward to place flowers on the coffin, Gina hesitated. She hadn't brought anything… except the folded note. As the people stepped away again, she swiftly dropped the note onto the coffin as it was being lowered into the hole. She whispered, "Thanks for leaving me the story, Darry. I promise I'll take good care of it."

Gina turned, andthen saw the two peopleface to face for the first time. They were both men, likely in their forties or fifties. They both wore strained looks as if they hadn't slept enough to care for being cheery.

The taller of the two said, "Ma'am, who do we have the pleasure of meeting?"

"I'm Gina Kavanagh. Mr. Curtis had me clean his house once a month for quite a few years now."

"Ah. That explains why you're here. I'm Skystrip, and my brother here is Cicero."

Cicero was the shorter of the two, and a bit stockier. He said, "Unfortunately, you must think rather little of Uncle Darrel's family that only we two are here, but… our wives had other things they decided they needed doing and the children have barely seen their great-uncle at all. I guess we didn't do a very good job passing on our father's ideals."

Skystrip looked pained and said, "Our dad always told us family was the most important thing; it had been all he'd ever had. It's why we're here, but… I wish _our_ families had had enough sense to come with us."

The strained looks on the two men made sense now; their uncle had just died. The man who they must have spent summers with in their youth had just passed away.

Gina felt somewhat less incensed. She'd been ready to tear a strip off the two gentlemen, but somehow, their own admission of imperfection tempered her feelings. _Nobody's perfect, you know._

Her curiosity was piqued and she asked, "Did he have a wife? Ever?"

Cicero said, "Yes. He did; he married after he bought the construction company, but unfortunately she died almost seven years ago. Aunt Sarah, her health was a bit fragile and towards the end she had been ill for almost two months. Because of her health and the concerns that pregnancy might overstress her, they'd never had children. For my part I always wished I'd had cousins."

Skystrip said, "Yeah. We were a lot closer to Uncle Darry when we were younger. We lived here in Tulsa back then, and we'd often go and see Uncle Darry. But then we both went off to school and then did our own things. I guess we kind of drifted apart, all of us, after that. Dad stayed here in Tulsa right up until the end, though."

Gina said, "Darry – he asked me to call him that – never said much about you guys or even Ponyboy. I saw his brother exactly once, and I don't remember him very well at all. He always seemed lonely to me."

"He may have been, but at least he had contact with you every month, so _someone_ was there looking out for him. Thank you, for that."

"And I'm glad at least someone besides me showed up for this funeral. But I've got to go; I need to take care of things at home and it looks like it's going to rain."

Skystrip and Cicero nodded, and shook hands with her. They were going to inventory the contents of Darry's house and see what they would want to take with them, and then sell what remained plus the house.

Gina headed back to her place, and rested on the couch, feeling drained. Without meaning to, she soon fell asleep.

**- - - - -**

Gina woke up, feeling very stiff and sore. It was near the evening, and the sun was shining. _So much for the rain_, she thought. She looked over at the yellowed papers, and realized that like it or not, her mission of getting them published meant she needed to get permission from the gentlemen she'd met earlier.

On a hunch, she drove back over to Darry's place after making a pit stop at a print shop. Two late-model cars were parked outside, and she could see Skystrip (she still had to chuckle inwardly at Ponyboy's strange naming habits) carrying what looked like an antique table lamp out to one of the cars. As she stepped out, he noticed her and waved.

Gina approached Skystrip and as she did so, Cicero came out of the house as well. She was a bit nervous, and said, "Hi. I'm sure you're wondering what kind of crazy cleaning lady comes back to her employer's house after he's gone and dead, right?"

The two men smiled a bit, and the tension lifted. Gina, still nervous, spoke. "Seriously, though… I hate to do this to you while you're still dealing with your uncle's death but there's something he left for me, and I'm thinking of getting it published. Because it used to belong to Darry, and you're his family, I need your permission."

The two men looked at each other and Cicero said, "Well, what is it?"

She showed them a photocopy of the first page, and their eyes went wide.

"Oh my god. Dad? He wrote something and left it here all this time? Never showed us? He wrote so much about so many things and he was never shy about showing us what he wrote!"

Gina couldn't tell if Cicero was bitter or sad. She said, "Look. I spent a fortune getting a photocopy made; I have it with me, and I suggest you read the thing. It's about when they were all young. It's vividly written and I seriously think publishing this could help someone, somewhere.

"The original sheets are turning pretty yellow and I don't want to handle them any more than I have to." She handed the stack of photocopied papers over to him.

Cicero was absorbed in reading the first few pages. Skystrip said, "Leave us your phone number and e-mail address and we'll get back to you as soon as possible."

She did so, and then left.

**- - - - -**

_Author Notes:_

Hey, all. Thanks for reviewing. This story does seem to want to keep going, so as long as Admiral Plot Bunny of the Universal Story Fleet keeps bringing me ideas,I'll keep writing. :)


	4. The Book

Disclaimer: Any characters from S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders are used here for the purpose of a fanfiction story, and not for any financial gain.

Thanks go to Bookworm2u and BlackLightningDX for the beta-reading. :-) And also, sorry to you all for taking so long to update this one. :)

* * *

A week passed. Gina tried to get back into her normal routine of classes and work, but she couldn't help but nervously wonder if she'd scared off Skystrip and Cicero.

One day, the warbling of her telephone startled her out of an intense period of reviewing for her English midterm, and Gina noticed the caller ID was showing a number she didn't recognize. Warily, she picked it up and said, "Hello?"

"Is this Gina Kavanagh?" The voice sounded familiar, a bit hesitant.

"Yes. Who is this?"

"Ah, this is Skystrip Curtis."

"Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your telephone number! How are you?"

"I'm doing okay. We've finalized the packing and moving and the house is going up for sale. But I wanted to call you about the manuscript you left with us." She could hear Skystrip taking a deep breath, as though he were about to plunge into a pool.

"Cicero and I had some long conversations about this, and we finally agreed to go ahead with publication. Since you were given the documents by Uncle Darry, the royalties would go to you. Yes, we could do this ourselves, but frankly, neither of us really wants to deal with literary and publishing agents and all that.

"So the only thing we ask is this: Please put the royalties toward a good cause."

Gina paused, then spoke. "Thank you very much for agreeing to go ahead with this. Your father's story was very moving, and I think many other people will feel the same way. I wasn't even thinking about royalties when I asked you about publication a while ago, but I've thought about it since we talked, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to send the royalties to groups and organizations that try to help abused children."

"That's perfect. I think our father would have done the same if he had gotten this published. Please keep in touch, Gina."

"I will. Thanks again!"

The _click_ of the phone on the other end punctuated Gina's sudden giddiness and nervousness as she thought on what would have to be done to get the book done.

Eventually, it came to pass that an agent was able to convince a publisher to print the book, with a short introduction by Gina and Ponyboy's sons, and _The Outsiders_ was born.

**- - - - -**

Author Notes:

Plot bunnies are hopping again. :-) Thanks go to all who reviewed.


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